Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of content searching and more particularly to the prioritized display of search results for content searches.
Description of the Related Art
Content browsing refers to the retrieval and presentation of electronic content in a browser client. Content generally can include electronic documents, messages, audio, audiovisual and video materials and imagery. Most commonly, content can be stored in a server environment and published for access by content consumers over a computer communications network such as the global Internet. Content consumers, in turn, can retrieve content over the network by reference to a network address for the content. Once retrieved, the content can be presented in a browser client including not only conventional visual browsers such as the venerable Web browser, but also in alternative browsers such as those deployed in pervasive devices and those supporting different modes of presentation such as the audible presentation of material.
Given the vast amount of content published for accessibility over the Internet, one cannot enjoy an awareness of a possible content of interest available for access over the Internet. Search engines fill the gap by providing an interface through which end users can instruct searches for documents according to one or more search terms. Basic search engines permit simple term searches where the presence of one or more search terms in content result in the return of a reference to the located content. More sophisticated search engines permit boolean searching and even more sophisticated search engines allow for natural language searching.
Where search terms are provided in a search engine, the results often reflect the relevance of a “hit” based upon a percentage of search terms present in the located content. Yet, in many cases, the search terms provided are not intended to be located in desired content. Rather, search engines frequently permit one to require the omission of any content containing a search term. In boolean terms, the NOT operation is permitted as well as the AND and OR operations. In any event, where the result list from a search is large, the returned document of greatest interest may be obscured from apparent view by the end user. Accordingly, prioritizing a list returned documents to render those of utmost interest can be of paramount importance.
Current methods for prioritizing the display of documents in a list of search results include providing advantage to documents which are more relevant to the query, documents which are updated recently, documents which are linked to by other documents often, and documents which are often selected in other similar searches. Some search engines do include the most recent content from particular feeds (like recent “Twitter™” entries, related to a given query. While these methods go a long way in presenting the user documents in most efficient form, these methods still leave a lot to be desired.